Presets – Max Payne Movie Style

Howdy folks. I hope you had a great weekend – I know I did. I’m gearing up for the Lightroom 2 Live Tour in Covington, KY this Friday so make sure you come out and see me if you’re in the area. Now, on to the presets. I was watching the NFL playoff games yesterday and saw a commercial for the upcoming DVD release of the Max Payne movie. I caught a quick glimpse of a neat effect that I quickly tried to replicate in Lightroom. It’s basically all red. At first it looked really weird but I tweaked a few other settings as well as added some edge darkening (doesn’t every effect have that these days) and it turned out pretty cool. One word of caution though. This preset is meant for a very specific style of photo. Photos that have that edgier look and especially sports or senior portraits will probably benefit most from it. In other words, don’t try it on photos of small babies, warm family portraits or tiny kittens

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

This is good. I’m going to change it though so that the edge effects aren’t there. Then I’ll go to Matt’s very first preset tip where he gives a choice of three varying strengths of edge darkening. That can be found here: